In the pretreatment process, the variety of pretreatment depending upon kinds of materials is so great due to characteristics of the fiber dyeing industry that pretreatment methods including a liquid composition ratio are minutely categorized according to types thereof. For example, in the case of silk, pretreatment methods include a knife hand pretreatment method, a padding method using a roller and the like. As a typical conventional pretreatment method, a mangle padding method is shown in FIG. 1. FIG. 1 shows a method for letting a fabric (12), which is fed by a feed roller, pass through a pretreatment liquid (13), squeezing the pretreatment liquid with which the fabric is stained through a mangle (11), and thereby applying the pretreatment liquid to the fabric. This mangle padding method is not suitable for a continuous batch process due to the characteristic of the printing process that the pretreatment liquid should be different according to the kind of textile or the kind of textile tissue. Even when only a part of the fabric is printed, the entire fabric should be pretreated so that the pretreatment liquid gets to be much wasted. Consequently, the mangle padding method requires a high cost and further it is likely to cause environmental pollution.
Also, if the pretreatment is conducted by a conventional method, it requires a given quantity of the fabric and the pretreatment liquid or more. This means that the fabric should be pretreated in advance and stored, and then whenever necessary, it should be printed, in view of the point that the inkjet printing method is adopted for the small quantity batch production system. If the pretreated fabric is stored, it gets to be damp due to the characteristic thereof or suffers a damage which gets to be a cause of defect, i.e., a scratch or the like when the inkjet printing work is actually conducted. Therefore, for meeting a small order, outputting a sample or maintaining the perfect quality, a method for pretreating the fabric just before conducting the inkjet printing work and consecutively conducting the inkjet printing work is required.
The present invention has been developed to solve the said problems, particularly to solve all problems occurring due to the use of the conventional analog processes, that is to say, the mangle padding method or the knife application method in pretreating the fabric in order to conducting the inkjet printing work. The present invention is to provide a method for conducting the inkjet printing work flexibly, consistently and continuously depending upon various kinds and tissues of fibers by developing a pretreatment liquid composition suitable for the inkjet printer as controlled by the digital signal system, applying it to the fabric material by the inkjet printing method, and enabling the liquid composition to be changed or the application thickness to be finely adjusted depending upon the kind and the tissue of each fabric material. Thereby, the present invention is to provide a printing method for ensuring that the quality of the printed fabric is uniform and perfectly reproducible by enabling the pretreatment of the fabric and the subsequent inkjet printing work to be consecutively conducted.